In a world with an intellectual history of seven thousand years behind it, where do Pakistanis stand, what are they doing, what do they aspire to be, and what ought they to be doing? This Blog takes Notes of all of that ...

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Siege from within

When creative spirit of a nation is arrested from within, it is as
vulnerable to external insinuations as is to internal machinations, and can
never make any progress.

“Pakistan is under siege.”

We had enemies from the very first day. With time, the list of our enemies grew
longer. So much so that today we have neighbors not friendly to us and a world
all hostile to us. We are alone in a wilderness created of our own. Isn’t it
Greek mythology whose gods and monsters we have resurrected in ourselves? Like
the one-eyed monster, we have no second eye to look inward. This on the one
hand has transformed us completely into subjects perfectly suitable for
psychological pursuits. Or, for instance, how can a judge of a higher court
find fault with bare feet of a dancer, and ban it? Or how can his ability and
capacity to judge be explained? (One of my friends says it’s a foot fetish!) Go
through any book of psychology, and see we are afflicted with almost all the
disorders identified there.

On the other hand, this lack of inner eye has deprived us of that touch of
philosophical contemplation and composition which is so integral to the
continuity of peaceful human co-existence. In every nook and cranny of our
society, from a hut to GHQ, and from a patient to the President, we have laid
Procrustean beds and are on guard no one unfits it. Those who are over-sized
are cut down, and those who are under-sized are pulled up to match the bed’s
length. In a sense, we watered and environmentaled all the seeds to grow into
the same and, lo, we have Bonsais all around us. Rather, we have shrubs unheard
of in the botanical history which are eating out one another, and stretching
their tentacles to far off lands to gulp others; it is as if we are working on
an agenda of self-annihilation.

At the same time, we have started ‘exporting’ our principles of experimentation
with human beings to other regions also. We are packaging our Procrustean beds
for other people, and use all means fair or unfair to ‘market-impose’ them, and
are thus causing other people to revive their own Procrustean beds and bring
them again into practice. This may turn the whole world into a big Procrustean
bed!

Alas, our ideological adventurers are no better than Procrustes. In a sense,
they are worse! Procrustes used to hack off or stretch his victims to fit his
bed, we kill all who unfit our beds, and in some cases, we kill all no matter
they fit or unfit our beds. We have left Procrustes far behind in sizing human
beings.

How’s that that we have turned into such monsters? Are we different from other
people genetically? Some people believe that is so; but that is an expression
of distrust and anger. All of us belong to the same progenitor. It is mainly
our mental, intellectual, psychological and philosophical make-up and thus our
behavior that differentiates us from each other. Otherwise we are the same
biological entity.

As it is, like others we are a product of two things, first, what we are
endowed with by birth, and second, what we learn and acquire on our own. We are
all born with almost the same capacity to learn unless it is some disability
that retards us; so naturally there is complete freedom available to everyone
to learn and acquire what he wants to learn and acquire. In a sense, it’s the
ultimate freedom that if realized can enable us to be master of our destiny.
That is, we are free to be what we want to be.

However, some of us happen to make a discovery of an immeasurable magnitude.
Somehow, they come to believe that they are free to be what they want to be,
and in addition to that, they are free to force others to be what those people
do or do not want to be. Such people in fact try to be master of others’
destiny, and deprive them of their freedom. Not only do they use every
opportunity and manner to further their Procrustean agenda, they manipulate
what is available and manufacture what is needed to achieve their Procrustean
objectives. They have no regard for what exists outside of them.

It is rather an edgy difference that distinguishes such people who live to
control and mould other people’s lives according to their ideas from those who
teach and preach other people to live in accordance with their philosophies.
It’s no matter of persuasion or submission, i.e. getting someone converted to
your ideas on the one hand by using rhetoric or reason or reward, and on the
other, by using fear or force or fraud. This difference is informed among other
things by the eternal issue of means and ends, i.e. ends do not justify means.
Hence, if one wants to persuade or coerce others into submitting to his ideas
there is an inherent danger of curtailing or snatching other people’s freedom.
That way others lose their freedom. The issue of corporal punishment to
learners is a derivative of the same debate.

But to make this debate possible and also to have it to continue, a theory of
conduct is desperately needed in Pakistan. This actually is a sine qua non for
all existence let alone for the human existence. That, everyone is free to have
his ideas, change them, abandon them, and dispose of them in whatever manner he
deems fit, and at the same time he is all free to live according to his own
ideas. That no one with whatsoever mandate, personal or otherwise, has any
authority to impose himself upon others and to take back others’ freedom on any
pretext personal or otherwise. All knowledge presupposes this freedom.

It may be objected that it is practically socially impossible to allow so many
individuals to live like that save at the expense of social harmony and peace.
That may be so! However, first there is morality and then there is law that
takes care of the difference, discord, disharmony, and conflict and clash among
individuals of a community.

Morality needs no enforcement; it is sort of self-discipline and a pragmatic
way of life though for those who know the value of moral principles and their
centrality to human co-existence. Law requires to be enforced by an authority.
In this it is as lame as morality. Both are intrinsically orphan waiting to be
adopted by some foster parents: moral principles are open to be adopted by,
rather obligatory for, every individual be he an ordinary or an extraordinary
person, whereas law must be enforced by an authority, which is nothing more
than a collection of persons, duly vested with its enforcement. It is of the
nature of law that its ignorance by anyone is never construed as an excuse to
seek alibi, instead it is binding to all and all are equal before law.

This does not mean that both morality and law lie entirely within their own
independent realms. How can we elevate a person to a law office who is morally
corrupt? The issue of the present chief justice’s daughter’s enhanced marks is
a case in point. Also, how can an outlaw be declared morally upright? The case
of Mr. Asif Ali Zardari is not entirely irrelevant provided he should have been
cleared by an independent court of all the accusations and allegations brought
against him by anyone. Morality preconditions, contextualizes and encompasses
law.

Against this backdrop, present circumstances of the Pakistani state are
extremely hopeless. It needs no painstaking to bring out the rampant
moral-lessness, value-lessness, and law-lessness at every level of our society.
We are all witness to it. Rather, part of it. But isn’t it the same cliché
everyone is wont of using? Yeah, apparently it seems so. But the argument this
article is going to make is different.

To blame all or to accuse all is jut meaningless. Likewise, to characterize a
society by anything is just like crying over spilt milk. To say that Pakistani
society has no morals, no values, no norms, and no principles to follow or that
it is a lawless society is just empty talk. Also, it does not mean, as is
usually implied, that there are good moral principled or law-abiding people in
every society, and we have our share of such goody-goodies.

As argued earlier, the nature of morals is different from laws; no prescribed
punishment is attached with them and everyone is free to follow or defy them,
so no responsibility can be fixed for transgressing morals or values, norms or
principles. In that they are a private thing. Some private organizations and
institutions use them as laws, i.e. they punish their members or employees in
case of violations of their adopted norms. They are private because no one owns
and implement them, i.e. no collective authority possesses them and their
enforcement. Hence, the meaningless and emptiness of the statement that our
society is devoid of all morals, values, norms and principles! Hence, the lack
of fixing any responsibility whatsoever for any violation by anyone!

That’s completely different in the realm of laws. All the laws are absolutely
meaningful and full of content. We may decry them, analyze them, and expose
their content and intent. All the laws are written with clearly defined terms
of punishment in case of their violation. We may criticize and declare these as
inhuman or savage. This enables the fixing of responsibility beyond any doubt
at least within a demarcated domain of adjudication. That is why all the
statements made on the bases of law always amount to clearly defined meanings
and fixed responsibility.

Thus, when this article talks of Pakistan as a lawless society, and as a
society without any morals or values or norms, it definitely means something
different from just what the above-mentioned cliché hints at. What this article
means is clearly in terms of fixing responsibility, and of course not just the
lamentable state of our society. It talks of a definite relationship between
morality and law as it manifests in our society. In other words, it purports to
formulate a thesis that throughout the six decades of Pakistan the absence of
rule of law has negatively impacted on all of our moral and social values, and
the efficacy of norms and principles for a virtuous life, and thus the
responsibility both for turning Pakistan into a lawless society and utter
degradation of the values is but on the shoulders of those who were lawfully
and constitutionally vested with establishing rule of law, dispensing justice,
and protecting life and property, and rights and freedoms of all the citizens
of Pakistan without any discrimination, and also those who were lawfully
designated to aid in the fulfillment of these basic duties of the state but
instead of following their lawful functions they violated them with pronounced
disregard, and it were they who played the major and active role in destroying
the value system in Pakistan. No damage is greater than that.

Thus, it is the utter disregard for law and its deliberate trashing verily by
those who were trusted with its sanctity and custody that hacked at the root of
all morality. As in spite of many a religious teaching and their doctrine of
reward and punishment, and as it is evident from people’s outward behavior and
practically from their actions also, that they have already learned that that
is all what is here in this world. Likewise, centuries’ experience of lawless
and immoral governments and rulers made people learn how to live without any
value system or in the midst of a value system that is based on the efficacy of
force. This experience may be generalized thus: it is the absence of rule of
law that nourishes and strengthens not only law-lessness but moral-lessness and
value-lessness also. Because, in a sense, in such a society sticking to morals,
values and principles does not pay. In our case, it is more than that since
instead of paying it makes one lose what he already possesses. Hence, in a perfect
vacuum of law majority of people abandon all morality.

In point of fact, if we do not let laws rule, reign of lawlessness will
prevail. If we do not establish rule of law, rule of criminals will emerge. If
the rule of criminals establishes itself, all the traces of morality will
disappear. What else have we got in Pakistan other than that? Actually the
absence of rule of law was not accidental in Pakistan. It was not done in
ignorance. It is a cold-blooded crime. What greater evidence is required to prove
that point but the way the rule of law movement has been thwarted first by the
military elite and then by the Pakistan Peoples Party government in unison with
their masters. This has pushed the crisis to its peak point where endures no
law and no morality in Pakistan.

There are three main culprits lawfully and constitutionally responsible for
bringing Pakistan on the brink of the precipice. First, it is the military
elite which represent force; second, it is the judicial elite which represent
law; and then, it is the political elite which represent democratic mandate.
Far from fulfilling their lawful and constitutional duties all these elites
constantly acted in violation of those duties. Instead of honoring their
constitutional mandates, all these elites stepped out of their constitutional
domains and made a travesty of everything from law and constitution of the land
to morality. Last but not least, they all in collusion seized the state of
Pakistan and set to further their elitist agenda to the best of their
interests.

Briefly dwelling on their destructive role, it is sufficient to mention that:
how the military elite staged coups, suspended and disfigured the constitution,
ruled the country by force, and exercised its influence from behind while it was
not present on the scene. How the judicial elite validated these coups starkly
against the dictates of the constitution, allowed the transgressors to rule and
to amend the constitution. How the political elite perennially betrayed their
democratic mandate and the cause of the fundamental rights of the people who
put them into power, how it played in the hands of the military elite and how
in complicity with it it never let those institutions, such as independent
judiciary, rule of law, come into existence and strengthen which could
safeguard the rights and freedoms of the people, and how it validated the
dictators-forced amendments in the constitution.

The worst form of lawlessness which we are witnessing today in most of the
areas of Pakistan such as those on the border of Afghanistan and the biggest
city of Karachi is the ultimate result of all these criminalities of these
elites. Their grabbing and transforming of Pakistan into an elitist state was
the greatest tragedy that could happen to a country. These elites deprived the
state of Pakistan from playing its due role, i.e. the role of an arbitrator,
mediator, moderator, and a referee, the task of which is to arbitrate, mediate,
moderate, and referee between the two or more disputant parties and settle and
resolve the conflict to the satisfaction of both or all irrespective of the
nature of those conflicts which may belong to the realm of civil, political,
economic rights, or relating to the fundamental rights and freedoms of the
citizens. In other words, they stripped the state of its protective function,
i.e. protection of its citizens’ life, property and rights and freedom.

At the worst, these elites made the state of Pakistan itself one of the
disputant parties. Not only politically, and economically, did the state stand
by one party but spiritually and religiously also it took sides, and emerged as
a contestant itself. This divided the society deeply negatively, and turned
Pakistan permanently into an arena where countless tugs of wars were and are
being fought to gain the control over the state. The resultant internal strife
consumed the energies of both the state and the society of Pakistan. It’s the
same fire that is burning us today.

It is in this context that the nature and intent of the Objectives Resolution
may best be explained though it contained cursory mention to people’s
fundamental rights too. Also, this helps understand the acute constitutional
crisis that afflicted Pakistan in its formative years till the constitution of
1973 was agreed upon and enforced. In retrospective, it is easier to analyze
how this constitution was made possible in 1973.

Actually, the period till 1973 is all fraught with a neck and neck fight
between the two major elites, military and political to take control of the
state. The making and unmaking of various governments and constitutions during
this period is sufficient to prove the point. The judicial elite being too week
to take sides on its own, permanently relaxed in the lap of the powerful one;
while the political elite when apparently in power always, as it is doing
today, tried to subdue it to its dictates but failed repeatedly.

However, it was in the early 1970s that in the wake of the first general
elections and the subsequent cut-throat power struggle between two major victor
parties, i.e. Awami League and Pakistan Peoples Party, in which military elite
put its weight on the side of the political elite of the Western wing of
Pakistan, and as a result of which Bangladesh came into being, that the military
elite was at its weakest. The war that Pakistan army lost in the Eastern wing
found about a hundred thousand of its army men as prisoners of war in India and
it had left that elite too frail and unprepared to assert itself and its
supremacy. That is how the constitution of 1973 sailed through. As it is, the
hands that resuscitated the fainted patient were hacked off just after four
years in 1977 and once again the military elite established its rule.

Thus, the state of Pakistan gradually reached a point where today it has lost
all moral and constitutional legitimacy. By taking on a role of a party and
completely abandoning its protective role and the role of a mediator and
referee, it let the Pandora’s political box open. From the very beginning ensued
a fierce struggle between the various sections of the society, in addition to
the two bigger elites the military and the politicians, to gain the control of
the state which with the passage of time intensified. All the power politics,
and its offshoots such as the military takeovers, constitutional breakdowns,
political, economic, cultural and religious persecutions are the major
milestones on this way down.

It was during the last days of the People’s Government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto
that the Pandora’s religious box’s lid was slid a bit (the Pandora’s economic
box had already been smashed into pieces in his government’s earlier years),
but it was wide-open during the 3rd military coup when General Zia-ul-Haq’s
Martial Law disfigured everything civil, moral, lawful and constitutional in
Pakistan. Since then, we have witnessed the creation of a number of (and
strengthening of the previously existing) armed and un-armed political and
non-political, religious and non-religious mafia like groups vying for the control
of the state to enforce their agendas. The armed groups found the
Zia-ul-Haqqian environment especially conducive for their growth.

The same phenomenon of the absence of a genuinely neutralized and legitimized
state let loose countless autonomous entities, from individual persons to
well-knit groups, which monopolized the use of force to promote their interests
and ideologies. They started making use of every thing and every means no
matter moral or immoral, legal or illegal, constitutional or un-constitutional,
peaceful or forceful, to compel the individual citizens to believe and behave
but in accordance with their prescribed ideological manuals. This gave rise, in
addition to political and economic, to moral and cultural policing in every
street and at every road throughout Pakistan. In sum, that was the final touch
to the siege from within.

That siege from within arrested the creative and enterprising spirit of the
nation and left it in a completely dried, wrung and barren state. No sphere of
life, learning, earning and recreation could escape that mischievous moral
policing. Woman was particularly the target of that devilry. She was no more an
individual; rather debased to the status of a soul-less object. The tentacles
of moral policing trespassed every encirclement of human civilization from
one’s privacy to the premises of someone’s home. No one remained safe even
within one’s house. The lot of the ordinary people was made miserable; they
were turned into helpless prisoners in their own homes.

Socially and politically, it begot the worst type of parasites. As the siege
retarded the real spontaneous growth, a parasitic economy emerged. From a
pariah to a president, no one was happy to earn fairly and honestly. Everyone
who got the opportunity whether he was a laborer or an industrialist tried to
take advantage of it to amass wealth by grabbing other people’s money i.e. tax
money in whatever manner he could do that. All politics became the art of
living and living lavishly at the expense of others. Outside government, goons
and mafia live like that.

Such are the times and circumstances we are living in. That’s the Pakistan we
are having today. This article has only generalized what is happening around.
No examples have been given since they abound. No mentions have been made, save
a few, since there are innumerable staring us in the face. The first thing we
need to know is that we are not under siege from outside, but from within.
That’s the hard truth! That is what this article has attempted to show. Also,
it has tried to show how that siege was laid to.

However, what this article has avoided to venture at is why we were besieged
from within? That such a question pertains to the realm of psychology which may
not provide us with a satisfactory answer is what the writer has no quarrel
with. In his view, even if we find the answer to that question why an oppressor
behaves like an oppressor, it will not help a bit to stop him from behaving
like that.

Also, it is the weaker, the oppressed one who is the real culprit; it is he who
lets the oppressor oppress him whereas it is characteristic of the human spirit
that it is absolutely free, i.e. we have an absolutely free soul. When one
makes him believe that he has been besieged, he is not free. He is free only
when he fights to break the siege. It is admitted that harder is to fight
against the siege from within than from without because our enemy is inside us.
But fight we have to go for.

Thus the second thing we need to know is that we are free and we can make that
siege disappear. What is possible and is practicable is that we the ordinary
people, we the oppressed ones, we the besieged ones, do not let the oppressor
oppress us, the besieger besiege us. We need to be self-assured that we are not
victims, that we are free people. It is as simple as that. It is our natural
and inalienable right not to be besieged by anyone, not to be oppressed by
anyone. But by just law alone! In case, we have been oppressed, laid siege to,
be it from within or without, it is morally incumbent on us to assert and stand
for our rights and freedoms, and struggle for that siege to be lifted. That’s
the simple way ahead to the resolution of our complex problems! That’s what we
are required to follow in Pakistan for the siege from within to be lifted once
and for all to regain the lost paradise of our rights and freedoms!

The Blogger

The blogger cherishes a cosmopolitan spirit; he is a moralist; a rationalist; a philosopher; a political philosopher; he believes in Classical Liberalism, as a Theory of Conduct.
He has substantially contributed to the founding of the first free market think tank of Pakistan, Alternate Solutions Institute.
He is a writer who wrote / published dozens of articles on a variety of issues, and is author of 4 books.
He wrote / published short-stories in Punjabi, a regional language of Pakistan.
He composes poetry both in Urdu and Punjabi, and has already published one collection.